After 30 years, the Yellowjackets continue their pioneering ways

Thursday

For fans of the Yellowjackets, it's all about the music, a steady stream of innovative jazz stretching back nearly 30 years.

For fans of the Yellowjackets, it's all about the music, a steady stream of innovative jazz stretching back nearly 30 years.

That music and the creativity it represents is certainly important to the group's members - it's the reason the 'Jackets have lasted so long. But beneath the notes and albums and tours lies something more fundamental.

A friendship.

"It's just something that fell in our laps," bassist Jimmy Haslip said of his relationship with keyboardist and fellow founder Russell Ferrante. "We met through (guitarist) Robben Ford back in the 1977, and we became friends instantly. We just really got along.

"Chemistrywise, it's all there. I'm really tight with his family; he's tight with my family. We enjoy each other's company."

That chemistry - both musical and personal - brings the Yellowjackets to town Saturday for a performance at San Joaquin Delta College. Bob Mintzer (saxophone) and Marcus Baylor (drums) round out the lineup.

Of course, friendship will get you only so far in music. Bands, after all, are also business entities requiring major time and energy commitments. Haslip noted that one reason the Yellowjackets have thrived is because the group remains a priority for its members - to the tune of 120 tour dates per year - even as it allows them to pursue other projects.

"All the guys are in the biz and are grade-A kind of musicians," he said. "We get calls to do a lot of different things.

"And then we bring something back into the band. It's a really, really good experience for us to have these other opportunities."

The fruit of those labors within the quartet and without can be heard (and seen) on the Yellowjackets' latest project, "Twenty Five" (2006). A career retrospective, the CD/DVD package features the group live in a small Italian jazz club. The recording can't help but remind listeners that a wide gap exists between jazz fusion and smooth jazz.

Fusion was all the rage when Haslip, Ferrante and drummer Ricky Lawson joined Ford for his 1977 album, "The Inside Story." Miles Davis had pioneered the genre in the late 1960s and was followed by groups such as Weather Report, Spyro Gyra and, later, the Rippingtons.

Haslip and Ferrante formed the Yellowjackets proper in 1981 and counted Ford as a member until 1984. Lawson left two years later.

By then, the group had released four albums and been swept up in the contemporary jazz boom of the 1980s. Mintzer joined in 1990 and Baylor in 2000.

A dozen albums have followed, over the course of which the Yellowjackets have pursued a sound that blends fusion's experimentation with a taste for melody.

"We were really inspired by groups like Weather Report and even Herbie Hancock's Headhunters," Haslip said. "We have something to do with this R&B-jazz thing that developed into this thing somebody called smooth jazz. I acknowledge that part. But we tried to make an about-face and completely stay away from that."

As for those musicians who have reached a much wider audience by turning fusion toward pop, Haslip holds no grudges.

'"If they are making a living paying the mortgage doing it, I say hats off to them," he said. "I prefer to experiment and push the envelope in some way."